Crime Story Daily Highlights – Week 37

This is a curated selection
of highlights from Crime Story Daily this week.

On the criminal
justice policy front: The Los
Angeles Times reports that on Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that state
jury verdicts in serious criminal cases must be unanimous. Only two states, Oregon
and Louisiana, still allow split verdicts to convict felony defendants – a
practice that critics say is rooted in racial, ethnic, and religious bigotry. The
Court’s ruling brings an end to those states’ nonunanimous jury systems, and is
expected to give several dozen prisoners the right to a new trial. A piece from
the New
Republic focuses on the broader implications of the Court’s decision. A
piece from the Brennan
Center explains the latest changes to New York’s bail reform law; and a
piece from the Marshall
Project examines the implications of bail reform rollbacks in New York for other
reform efforts around the country.

In muckraker/watchdog
reporting: A piece
from The
Atlantic focuses on the spread of the coronavirus in prisons, jails, and
ICE detention facilities, where the pandemic is testing Fifth Amendment
protections on due process and humane conditions of confinement. A piece from
the New
York Times focuses on the first fatal coronavirus outbreak in the federal
prison system, at FCC Oakdale in rural Louisiana. Through interviews with inmates,
staff, and family members, the piece constructs a comprehensive timeline of the
outbreak, highlighting repeated failures by the Bureau of Prisons to implement
an effective response. A piece from the Intercept details prison officials’ “absurd” attempts to track the spread of the coronavirus
by monitoring inmates’ phone calls. In at least three states, jail and prison
officials are “using software to scan inmate calls for mentions of the
coronavirus, a move advocacy groups believe paves the way for abuse while
raising stark questions about carceral health care.” And a piece from the Brennan
Center emphasizes the need for prison labor reform. More than a dozen
states are now relying on prison labor to manufacture hand sanitizer, toilet
paper, and personal protective equipment needed by healthcare workers and other
frontline responders. Incarcerated workers are excluded from OSHA regulations
on workplace safety, often face dangerous and dehumanizing conditions, and are
paid next-to-nothing for their labor; in Arkansas, where prisoners are
producing cloth face masks, their work is entirely uncompensated. “This
unprecedented health emergency,” the piece argues, is “re-exposing how our
country’s long-held practice of paying nothing or next-to-nothing for
incarcerated labor, with no labor protections, is akin to modern-day slavery.”

In complex crime
storytelling: A
piece from the New
Republic offers a “brief criminal history of the mask.” In recent weeks, major cities around the country have
enacted emergency mandates requiring residents to wear facemasks in public. However,
many states already have existing laws prohibiting mask-wearing, some dating
back as far as the mid-1800s. The piece explores the interesting origins and history
behind New York’s anti-mask law – a history rooted in the same rhetoric of
public order and public safety as the pro-mask mandates of today. And a piece from Vanity Fair focuses on Jimmy Rackover, the “surrogate son – and alleged lover – of New York’s
‘jeweler to the stars.’” In 2016, a party at Jimmy’s apartment ended in the brutal
murder of a stranger; the crime became an instant tabloid sensation, even as
the details of what had actually happened – and who was responsible – remained unclear.

And in culture/true crime: Vox reviews “The Innocence Files,” a new series from Netflix that explores eight different stories of wrongful conviction and exoneration. Alissa Wilkinson writes that “The Innocence Files” is “among the strongest documentary series about criminal justice I’ve ever seen — both for its depth of research and the almost unbelievable nature of what it reveals about the American justice system’s intransigence in reversing wrongful convictions, even when it’s plainly obvious that something went awry.” And Vox reviews “The Thing About Pam,” Dateline’s first foray into the narrative true-crime podcast genre. “The Thing About Pam” starts with the 2011 murder of Betsy Faria, an unassuming small-town housewife, and then explores the spiral of increasingly outrageous real-life plot-twists that ensued. Betsy Faria’s is “one of the wildest true crime stories in recent memory”; through its telling, “The Thing About Pam” offers both a compelling crime narrative and a powerful indictment of a “deeply fallible justice system.”